I have perhaps a different take on this.

For reasons I won't bother going into, my food childhood was one of "let
him eat what he wants" and I then had the money and freedom to choose
what I ate. The result is that now I am amazingly picky as to what I
eat. I will try new things/new ways of cooking, but only when I choose to.

Moral of my tale is to persuade kids to try stuff using foul means or
fair but without going too far, I still will not eat Tongue or Tinned
tomatoes (served on their own) basically because of memories of aunts
that were well meaning but far too strict

Steve




Chatty Cathy wrote:
> Been thinking about picky eaters again....
>
> I have two children (many years apart). DS was the first-born - and when
> he was a "toddler" we had little or no access to seafood or shellfish,
> with the result that he never had much of either. To this day, he
> dislikes anything remotely "fishy". He will eat almost anything else,
> tho'. OTOH, our younger one (3 y/o) has been exposed to many kinds of
> food, including seafood/shellfish and she seems to like it all.
>
> I have noticed it with a quite a few of my friends - both with them and
> their children as well - they seem to like what they grew up with and
> are not all that keen to try anything that could be termed "strange food".
>
> Anybody else think that if children are not "exposed" to certain foods,
> say between the ages of 2 and 6 y/o, that they will never really
> develop a taste for it, or that it will "take some doing" to get them to
> try something "new" when they are adults?